I hate Elon maybe even more than the next guy, but there are some major exaggerations here:
Starlink makes tons of maneuvers to avoid collisions: https://www.space.com/starlink-satellite-conjunction-increase-threatens-space-sustainability
Starlink is at an orbit that they are quickly returning to Earth and burning up on re-entry: https://cybernews.com/news/starlink-lost-200-satellites/
Sadly, it seems both sides of any discussion have now mastered hyperbole, manipulating statistics, leaving out facts and stretching the truth to make their argument. You basically can’t believe anything you read any longer.
If there’s anything I’ve noticed using Lemmy for news (before that I didn’t really have a general news source) it’s that the headline is always wrong, and the article almost always corrects it—but all of the comments are about always just people who read the headline and act as if it’s gospel with even reading the article.
If the sites didn’t put it all beyond pay walls it might remedy that problem a little bit. Force people to jump through hoops just to read shit journalism and they will do the easier thing: debate headlines.
I appreciate the fact-check!
Seems like we can’t go a week between inaccurate posts complaining about Starlink getting traction
It’s almost as if a small percentage of Lemmy posts are generated with chatGPT to supply content.
Still better than the not-so-small percentage on Reddit… 🤷
Fact is, satellite internet from low earth orbit is the best solution in some parts of the world, and the ones to blame are literally the exact ISPs it’s competing with by providing service to the underserved. It’s a necessary option in providing the constant connectivity out society expects and relies upon (whether or not intermittent outages should be acceptable is a different discussion)
I would love to see some legislation requiring satellite ISPs to share infrastructure so we don’t have 3 incompatible competing services with duplicated but not necessarily redundant infrastructure. That would be a far more useful goal to push for
Spoiler: It’s 0.1 tonnes of CO2e per subscriber per year. This is not mentioned in the article.
This includes for example the emissions generated in the course of constructing the rockets that launch the satellites. So far it’s unclear to me whether, when comparing to terrestrial telecom, they include e.g. the emissions produced when manufacturing the trucks that deploy the infrastructure.
This also means the amount of emissions per user will go down the more users they get. It’s not very fair to compare something new to something that’s been around for decades in something that is based solely on the amount of users they have. I hate starlink, but this report is trash.
Emissions are going to go down when starship is made as well.
Starship uses a methane + oxygen fuel which burns cleaner, and can be produced with just water and CO2 making it carbon neutral.
I don’t think every flight will be neutral immediately, or what % will be consistently once its scaled up, but it’ll be better.
But 1 carbon neutral flight sending up hundreds of satellites will bring it down quickly. They could even save the carbon neutral flights for themselves for PR purposes.
Thank you, I was wondering how high the emissions could possibly be for Internet access from the customer’s perspective. I figured simply owning a car probably smashed even “30x as much” as other ISPs
It’s like giving billionaires access to do reckless shit that can literally impact humanity’s future may be problematic.
Wow
I’m actually surprised internet takes 3% the amount of energy it takes to get to space just to run some internet wires. I’d have thought it would be much much lower than that.
But also, starlink completes with geostationary satellite and home cellular connection more than internet over wires. Or even people who didn’t have an option before.
I’d like you all to consider that places where you’d use starlink are also significantly more than 30x farther away from civilization than the average land-based internet user.
This sub needs a fuckin identity already.
My Internet here is like 1-3 Mbps if I’m lucky because I have 2 shitty options. Launch some more of these fuckers up there so I can have useful Internet.
How about we encourage more competition or make it state owned instead?
Make it owned by the people responsible for us having shit Internet to start with. Brilliant, what could go wrong?
Capitalists are the reason for that. Government involvement is just that the rules weren’t written well enough (although sometimes on purpose because they’re being paid, but still it’s the fault of capitalists, not the government).
No … the government is responsible for us. Lt having a useful public service. Capitalism is trash but at least we have space internet which is more than we were ever going to get from rich old fucks making laws. But then we get full on exceptional individuals that get angry because they think it’s gonna stop them from moving to Mars… in the words of Danny Boone " ain’t no motherfuckers gonna live on Mars".
Make it owned by the people responsible for us having shit Internet to start with. Brilliant, what could go wrong?
